Structured city data: Malmo Civic Lab — Public services in an everchanging world
For the past six weeks, I’ve been working for the public sector, more accurately for Malmö City as part of Malmo Civic Lab.
Malmö Civic Lab is an experiment by the city of Malmö to reveal ways of improving life for the citizens by prototyping using tech and design. MCL has been around for a couple of months and consists Måns Adler, Timo Engelhardt and myself.
The nature of change
The world is moving fast. About 10 years ago the iPhone was introduced and with that also a change in how we shop, move, communicate, date etc.
This is a reality all businesses are facing: changing markets, user needs and expectations. It will change their products and services and most likely also how they’re run. And the only thing they can conclude is that it will keep changing.
The pain of change
This not only the reality for businesses, but also for the public sector. The only difference is that if businesses don’t adapt, the customers disappear and the business dies. In the public sector, the citizens often have no choice and it’s them who will face the pain of adapting.
Homeless and housing
The past 3 weeks we’ve been investigating how Malmö is matching homeless with housing. It’s a complicated and fascinating process with many needs and different user journeys. We’ve identified a couple of potholes in the process, for which we’re currently developing prototypes to learn.
The main discovery is how the users of the service have changed but the service hasn’t.
Changing market and needs
Housing is offered to two groups in Malmö: social homeless and structural homeless. Social homeless are single people with social problems such as mental health issues, alcohol or drug abuse. Structural homeless are families unable to find affordable housing due to unemployment, inadequate income or lack of references from previous landlords.
The service, that Malmö City is offering, was initially designed for social homeless and works as a staircase-solution, you basically train to be able to take over a contract. But today the market and needs look very different, which is causing frustration for the homeless and civil servants.
The cause of change
This is a problem every business and service will run into, the user group may change over a long period, it might change overnight.
The change might be caused by technology, like the iPhone example, it might be caused by climate or -health changes. In this particular case, the change is caused by migration and political changes.
“The poorer people who come to the city from other places aren’t mad or mistaken. They flock to urban areas because cities offer advantages they couldn’t find in their previous homes” — Triumph of the City
Poverty in cities
There will always be poor people in bigger cities. Cities attract poor people with the ambition to improve their lot in life. And the poverty rate amongst recent arrivals in cities is higher than the poverty rate of long-term city residents, which indicates over time, people living in cities can improve considerably.
“It’s far better to hope for a world where cities can accommodate millions more of the rural poor than to wish that those potential immigrants would end their days in agricultural isolation” — Triumph of the City
The future of homelessness
In the future we might have big groups of people from blue collar jobs out of work due to AI, we might see a big increase of young people sick, and out of the job market, due to mental health issues. It’s impossible to predict. The only thing we know with certainty is that it will change.
Flexible services
The main task for the city is, therefore, to adapt and change its services according to the needs of its citizens. We can do that by using metrics to guide and us and prepare to adapt. We can do that by helping civil servants, working with the services, accept and understand that their jobs will change and that they should influence that change based on metrics, observations and insights.
“The absence of poor people in an area is a signal that lacks something important, like affordable housing or public transportation or jobs for the least skilled” — Triumph of the City
